Experts are calling for a review of the agricultural sector budget to align it with the Malawi 2063, the country’s long-term development blueprint, by ensuring that neglected sectors receive decent financial allocations.

This follows an analysis of the 2022/23 National Budget  presented to the Agriculture Committee and Natural Resources budget cluster of Parliament by Action Aid Malawi and the National Association of Smallholder Farmers in Malawi (Nasfam).

Flashback: Small-scale farmers queue to buy farm inputs under AIP

Action Aid head of programmes and policy, Clement Ndiwo Banda, in an interview urged the Ministry of Agriculture to review intra-sectoral allocation to improve on operational efficiencies as the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP) is over-concentrated at the expense of other equally deserving programmes such as research, extension and livestock development.

He said: “We urge the Ministry of Finance to consider re-allocating resources from other non-performing programmes and projects to programmes that have been under-funded such as research, extension, livestock development and other transformative interventions as per Malawi 2063 implementation plan 1.

“Ministry of Finance should always scrutinise sector budget documents and annual work plans before approval to ensure they include gender, disability and inclusiveness indicators and targets and aligned to the targets and indicators in sector specific policies and plans.”

In the 2022/23 National Budget, the agriculture sector has been allocated K447.7 billion, which is 15.8 percent of the total budget, up by 14 percent allocation in the previous budget and up by 36 percent from K284.4 billion in the 2021/22 financial year.

In the agriculture sector budget, AIP has claimed 85 percent (K109.5 billion) of the other recurrent transactions (ORT) budget.

The analysis notes that although the allocation resulted in about K33 billion being saved from last year’s K142 billion allocation, AIP continues to affect implementation of the budget.

Nasfam head of policy and communications, Beatrice Makwenda said there is need to adopt a sector-wide-road map on AIP and ensure a clear plan is popularised on graduation of beneficiaries,  targeting exit methodologies.

She said linkage with markets should go beyond the emphasis on Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporatio as it confuses the discussion on market development.

Beyond the domestic market focus , Makwenda said export markets need to be pursued; and value addition scaled up, including balancing the commodity mix on AIP to align with government’s diversification agenda.

On extension services being underfunded, Makwenda observed that globally, recommended extension-worker-to-farmer ratio ranges between 1:500 (in case of poor mobility) and 1:700 (in case of good mobility).

However, as of 2021, Malawi’s average extension-worker-to-farmer ratio is at 1:1 929 as the country has only 2 117 extension workers serving 4 082 658 farming households.

Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture deputy chairperson Ulemu Chilapondwa agreed with the analysis by the two institutions and urged the Ministry of Agriculture to review the budget to achieve the desired balance.

He said: “If we allocate more resources, for instance, to livestock, you will see that lives of our farmers will improve in the next two to three years, such that they will begin to wean themselves out of overdependence on subsidies and handouts because they will have been economically empowered.”

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